[First published September 14, 2005] Once all countries are liberal democracies, government sponsored terrorism will end. This does not necessarily mean the end of terrorism per se, for there well may be disaffected clans, cults, tribes, other minorities, and individuals (remember the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh) who may employ terrorism.

But, even then, the overall severity (number killed) of internal violence in the world will be much less than when were there dictatorships scattered about. The latest evidence for this is the chart below showing the sharp decline in conflict/violence with the growth of global democratization ( shown here , here, AND here). I’ve shown other plots of the decline in violence (see here, but this time the source of the data for the chart is different. In this case, it is the data of Strand, Wilhelmsen, and Gleditsch for 1946-2004, and is on the internet (here). The chart is from the UN’s Human Development Report for 2005 (here).

Note the decline in every kind of conflict, most involving violence. As global democratization progressed and dictatorships declined, a critical mass of liberal democracies was achieved between 1985 and 1990, and thereafter the impact of the accumulated democracies caused the decline of all kinds of international and internal conflict/violence. This is as it should be by theory, by the democratic peace propositions, and by the cross-national empirical results.

And thus I feel comfortable in saying that a fully liberal democratic world will not know government sponsored terrorism and much less individual and group terrorism than we see today.

Link of Day

In a rare public release, the U.S. intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center has assembled a new set of terrorist attack statistics that provides a more complete–and disturbing–picture of the global terrorist threat. In all, the NCTC found some 3,192 separate terrorist incidents in 2004, involving 28,433 victims (including 6,060 people who were killed). Iraq was the site of more than a quarter of all attacks last year, followed by India, Nepal, and the Gaza Strip. Iraqis were also 27 percent of the victims of the attacks. Twenty-two percent were Nepalese, and 9 percent were Russian (most from the bloody school hostage crisis in Beslan by Chechen rebels). Iraq accounted for six of the 10 deadliest terrorist incidents.

Last week U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour sentenced a defendant to prison for plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport. In the course of the sentencing, the judge criticized the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 policies, such as the use of military tribunals and the detention of enemy combatants. He said that “the message to the world from today’s sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart.”

Altogether, now: WE ARE AT WAR. Americans are dying in combat; our enemies, such as Al-Zarqawi above, have announced that they are out to kill us, destroy our country, and take away our freedom. Already, about 3,000 civilians have been murdered in a sneak terrorists attack on the United States, more than the soldiers, airmen, and sailors killed in the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.